


Wrong Time

by BurningTea



Series: Missing You [2]
Category: Leverage
Genre: Aimee gets hurt, F/M, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-03
Updated: 2016-09-03
Packaged: 2018-08-12 19:15:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,242
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7945990
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BurningTea/pseuds/BurningTea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Aimee turns up for a visit at the wrong time and walks right into the middle of a con.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wrong Time

**Author's Note:**

> This is from the prompt 'hurt/comfort and disoriented', from a prompt by [tidal_race](http://archiveofourown.org/users/tidal_race/pseuds/tidal_race).
> 
> This is pretty much a sequel to ['More Than Need'](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7750213), in effect, in which Aimee and Eliot reconnect and decide to make a go of being together even though Eliot stays with Parker and Hardison and Leverage Int, and Aimee stays with her horses.

Aimee wasn’t supposed to walk in. Eliot’s still tied to the chair when the door creaks open, still working on the right moment to free himself of that last restraint and put himself to work. This con was supposed to be done and dusted long before Aimee next stopped by to visit.

He knew letting it spill into their own restaurant was a bad idea, but they were on Plan L by then and not wanting to get near Plan M. There were no plans where Aimee walked in, looked startled, and got a bat swung right at her. 

“I’m going now!” Eliot snarls, throwing himself from the chair and into combat before he hears Hardison’s acknowledgment. 

He has half the bastards down and bleeding before he gets chance to check on Aimee. She’s crumpled against the wall, still on her feet, with a hand pressed tight to her head. The guy who attacked her is on the ground. That’s his girl.

Under a minute later, he has the last of them out cold and leaves them, ordering Hardison to get Parker down to deal with securing them. He has other things to see to. 

Aimee glares at him from under her hand, one eye closed and the other one squinting. It’s still quite the glare. Her hair spills over her hand and Eliot sees some of it stained a darker red.

“You’re cut,” he says, reaching out for her and scowling when she tries to pull away. “Let me help you. You’ve been hit in the damn head.”

“Like I haven’t been hit in the head before,” Aimee says, the words a near hiss.

Eliot’s been in war-zones and on missions where it’s all gone sideways so fast he’s seen people with iron-hard nerves lose it completely. Mostly, he can keep his head no matter what, rolling with what’s happening even if it’s not meant to be happening, but seeing Aimee injured in front of him, by people Eliot was meant to be keeping away from Hardison’s part of the con, is something he’s having trouble fitting together. The pieces are there, but they won’t form a pattern. She isn’t even supposed to be here now.

He feels like he’s taken a strike to the skull, but that’s not enough to stop him functioning. He holds out his hand again. He waits.

Eliot isn’t sure if it’s from pain or from irritation, but she lets him support her over to a chair. She stumbles over one of the goons’ outstretched arms as they go, and this time the hiss is all pain. As soon as she’s lowered into the chair she closes both eyes and presses her other hand to her head.

Noise by the far wall tells him Parker’s arrived. He knows the way she moves, knows the sounds of it, and he knows he can leave her to keep an eye on things for a few minutes.

Eliot only lets Aimee sit like she is for as long as it takes him to fetch his first-aide kit. As soon as he’s back he urges her to move her hands.

“I need to see the wound, sweetheart,” he tells her. He’s mostly successful at keeping the tension from his voice, but the soft, warm drawl he goes for when he’s calming a mark has next to no chance of working on Aimee. He aims for somewhere in between that and what he wants to do, which is keep shouting. “There’s blood. Can’t just ignore that.”

“I’ll be fine,” Aimee says, not moving.

“He hit you with a bat!” Eliot says. Okay, shouts. He rushes to apologize when Aimee winces again. “Sorry. Sorry, but it was a bat. You can’t just scowl until it goes away.”

“Did I look like I was just scowling it away, Eliot Spencer?” Aimee says through her teeth. “I’m not stupid. I blocked. The handle got me when he lost his grip on it.”

Okay. So, not a full smack to the head the way Eliot thought. Still, there’s blood. Aimee seems a fraction calmer now she’s talking, though, so he forces himself to rest his hands lightly on her thighs and stay crouched in front of her. He can take a few moments to get her on board with letting him help. 

“Your block made him drop the bat? Must have been the guy’s first day on the job.”

“The block just stopped him hitting me,” Aimee says, and she shifts one hand down to the back of her neck, opening her eyes at the same time so he can see a sliver of hazel. “It’s when I hit him he lost the bat.”

That should not be such a surprise to him. Aimee never gave up a fight when they were kids, not unless he won beyond any shadow of a doubt, and she never let him go easy on her, either. Somehow, with the years of everything he’s seen and done, he let those memories fade. Compared to what Eliot can do now, Aimee is helpless, but that doesn’t mean she’s actually helpless. Even so…

“You knocked out a trained fighter,” he says. “You been having to fight the horses or something?”

“Don’t be stupid, Eliot,” Parker says, appearing next to him, her face far closer to his than seems necessary. “Aimee’s been sparring with me when we meet up. And we found her a club back where she lives. She doesn’t fight the horses.” Parker leans in even further, narrowing her eyes. “No-one should fight horses. They’re just looking for their chance.”

The look in Aimee’s eyes is part triumphant, even through the pain. She’s always liked being able to make him reevaluate and she’s never been much for Eliot treating her like something fragile.

“Okay,” he says. “Well. Good. Can I look at your head, now?”

Parker pats Aimee’s knee, brushing Eliot’s arm as she does so. 

“Eliot’s good at checking injuries,” she tells Aimee. “Good with his hands.”

Parker lifts both hands and wiggles her fingers and that does not help at all. Eliot’s still too wound up over Aimee being hurt to laugh, but he knows Aimee’s going to make the most of that comment and Parker’s gesture just as soon as she’s feeling better. There’s already a hint of a smirk playing about her lips. 

“Well, if he’s really so good with his hands,” Aimee says, and pain, irritation and humor make for quite a mix in her voice. 

Eliot feels like he left solid ground behind him a while back and has no chance of finding it again anytime soon.

He’s mostly done checking her over by the time Hardison arrives, the officer they’ve been working with trailing him. Aimee barely spares the newcomer a glance. Hardison throws a worried look her way as he talks to the officer and Parker shrugs at him and mimes hitting herself over the head. 

“I’m fine,” Aimee says, even though Eliot didn’t think she was looking Parker’s way, or Hardison’s. “I just need to rest.”

“I’m gonna need to wake you up-”

“Yes, yes. I know,” She says, cutting Eliot off. She does hold out an arm so he can help her stand, though. “You at least tidied up your room, didn’t you? I’m not going to have to sleep in a mess.”

Eliot blinks and loses his words. He never leaves his room in a state, and if he did it wouldn’t be tidy now because Aimee is well over a week early. He catches sight of Parker’s stern expression before he can gather up anything to say in return, and he sighs. Fine. Aimee’s hurting. She can have this one. But he’s setting the record straight in the morning. 

She lets him settle her on the bed and smiles properly for the first time since she saw the guys holding Eliot prisoner. 

“You all done playing nurse for now?” she asks.

Her hair is spread around her on the pillow, some of it still in need of blood washing out despite Eliot having sponged the worst of it away. It’s only a cut to the skin on her scalp and she swears she isn’t dizzy or nauseous, but he isn’t going to be done ‘playing nurse’ until he’s absolutely sure she’s okay.

“I’ll wake you up to check on you,” he says. “You want me to stay or go?”

He usually doesn’t want anyone around him when he’s hurting, preferring to lick his wounds in peace somewhere he knows he can defend easily, but Aimee doesn’t have his background. It occurs to him he’s never had to see her after she’s been hurt in a fight, and that shouldn’t be the kind of thing that needs to occur. It should just be normal. It says a lot about Eliot’s life that he’s more used to being around people who have plenty of recovery stories, even if most of them are nowhere near his level.

Aimee watches him for a while before speaking. She reaches out and touches his wrist, her fingertips just reaching.

“Stay,” she says. 

That one word seems to cause her more pain than the head injury. He wonders how many times she wanted to say it in the past and didn’t, how many times she wanted him to listen and he didn’t. This, what they’re trying now, isn’t quite him staying. 

Hell, after this con they’re going to have to move cities again. They knew they would, the minute they went to Plan L, and Eliot needs to set about officially giving the restaurant to his employee of choice. He needs to gather up the items he wants to take with him. There are a few more details to handle on this con, mostly tidying up now Hardison’s back from his end of things, and then they’ll be moving on. 

Still, he feels like things are spinning and shifting around him, stopping him from getting a firm grasp on any of it. He’s not going to make the best decisions if he tries to sort things out now. He can spend the night lying next to Aimee. 

The first time he wakes her, she mutters something insulting at him and swats him as he leans over her, but she’s fine. The second time goes the same way. Despite being trained to go without sleep, he finds himself drifting after that, his head pillowed near Aimee’s and her warmth so close to him. 

In the morning, he’ll check where they are with the con and get started on what needs doing to cut ties with Seattle. It’s been good to them for the last ten months, but they’ve already got plans to head to Austin. Apparently, Parker has it in mind for a reason, but she hasn’t shared the reason yet. 

He doesn’t realize he’s slipped into sleep until he’s back downstairs, tied to the chair, watching a thug with a bat take a swing at Aimee. Only, in the dream she doesn’t block. In the dream, Eliot can’t break the last restraint. In the dream, that bat connects and the damage it does is all wrong. He’s seen that sort of damage, exactly that sort of damage, on a young soldier with blonde hair back when Eliot was nineteen. 

Aimee slumps, hitting the wall like before and sliding all the way down. Her eyes are open. Eliot stops fighting to save her and starts fighting to get free so he can close her eyes. If he can just close her eyes, so she’s sleeping, only sleeping, it’ll be all right. It won’t have happened. It won’t be like when he had to drag that soldier’s body, knowing the kid was dead and still trying to get her out. It-

“Eliot?”

Aimee’s voice reaches him and he gasps awake, sitting up and freezing. He can’t quite bring himself to look round and he winds up staring at his hands, at the outlines of his fists against his knees in the near-dark of the room.

“Eliot?” Aimee asks again and he feels the bed shift as she moves, sees the movement as she starts to reach for him and stops. “You okay, there?”

“I’m meant to be keeping an eye on you,” he says, his voice gruff. He swallows and tries again, still not managing to turn his head. “It’s nothing. Bad dream.”

“Right,” she says, the doubt in her voice clear. She doesn’t say what he was doing or saying in his sleep and he has no intention of asking. They’ve done this before, enough times he knows she’d hold him if she could. “Do you want to lie down again?”

“How’s your head?” he asks instead, because no way is he taking the focus from her. She got hit because Eliot’s still in the kind of job where men come at him with bats, and worse, and thank any god listening it had only been a bat. And that Parker’s been working with Aimee on fighting, something Eliot should have done. “You feel sick?”

“Just a bit of a headache,” Aimee says. This time, her hand lands on his shoulder and she rubs a slow circle into his skin. “You’re going to have to move again, aren’t you?”

She’s always been bright, his Aimee.

“Yeah. Yeah, this place is blown.”

“Where are we going next?” she asks.

For a moment, Eliot blanks on the answer. He had it just a minute ago, but now it comes to telling her, he wonders if this is it. Maybe this is when they admit their attempt to be together, at least some of the time, comes to an end. Because Aimee was never meant to get caught up in a con, not even on the edges of it, and she was certainly never meant to get hurt because of one.

“Don’t you do that,” she says, still soothing her hand along his shoulder and dipping down to his back. “Don’t you think for one minute of not telling me.”

“Aimee-”

“No. No, I can see you thinking it. You’re all snarled up because I got hurt, right? And I’m not gonna lie. I’m pissed at that. But it’s not reason to give up.”

The image of her lying with her eyes open and empty flashes up strong enough it almost blanks out what he’s really seeing, and he shakes his head. He lets his hair fall over his face. 

“It ain’t that easy.”

“None of this is easy,” she says. “Well, some of it, maybe. But there’s more than enough that we could walk away, if we wanted to, and claim we gave it a shot.” Her hand slides a little further down his back. “That’s not what I want, though, and I don’t think it’s what you want, either.”

“It’s not,” he says. 

Parker gave him a lecture just the other month about being honest and open, which was rich coming from her. Except for how she’s maybe the most honest person he knows, in some respects. Parker meant with Aimee, though, something she made very clear over the course of a whole evening. Eliot just knows Sophie was somewhere behind that, as well, even if the woman was in Prague at the time. 

“It’s not what I want, but I don’t want you hurt. I don’t want you…” Honesty is far harder sometimes than it should be. “I don’t want you killed. You got any idea how easily that could have been your corpse I was lifting off the floor?”

Aimee snorts.

“You didn’t lift me off the floor.”

“Still.”

“Still, you didn’t lift me off the floor, and do you know how many people die because of horses every year?” 

He does, but he doesn’t interrupt. He turns his head to watch her as she goes on, letting relief at seeing her flood him, despite knowing she was all right, that the dream was just that.

“You gonna tell me I can’t ride my horses, next? Or maybe you want me to sit in my bed all day, wrapped up in blankets until you can swing by and check on me?”

“Of course not,” he says.

“Well, then. If you’re done beating yourself up over this, maybe I can get some more sleep? I didn’t get the best connections coming here.”

“I’m not beating myself up,” he says, but he knows he is. He knows how far Aimee is from being safe around him, too, and that’s before anyone gets any ideas about using her against him. Eliot makes a mental note to have Hardison double and triple check all of their safeguards around that. “I just don’t want to see you hurt.”

He’s almost sure she’s going to say something like ‘Then don’t look’, but instead she sighs and moves closer, resting her chin on his shoulder. Her hand makes it all the way to his hip and her other arm goes over his stomach, bracketing him. He feels her link her fingers together. 

“I don’t want you hurt,” she says, “but that’s part of what we’re working out, here, right? How to be us, the way we are, and be together. Never said it was going to be all sunshine and roses. Or any roses.”

Aimee has never liked roses. She does like sunflowers, and tulips, and daffodils.

“I can get you roses, if you want,” he says, just to hear her say she doesn’t want them, just because he knows when he says things like that she’ll kiss whatever part of him is closest. 

“I want you, Eliot Spencer,” she says. “And just because you ran a con when I was due to visit doesn’t mean I’m going to let you chase me away. I’ll be coming with you to your new city. I’ve got a full two weeks vacation planned and I’m spending it with you.”

He lets go the fact she’s here during the wrong week and lets the closeness of her, the security of her arms around him, drive away the lingering image of death. He knows he’ll have that dream again, added to the play-list he has to face as it is, but right now he has her alive next to him and he’s going to hang on to that.

“Okay, then,” he says. “I think you’ll like the place. Hardison says he’s already got a restaurant picked out for me and a home for us. Got you a reading nook, he says.”

“Sounds good,” Aimee says, sleep edging into her words. “It got a garden for you?”

He feels her drift off as he tells her what he knows, and he eases her down until her head’s back on the pillow. He’d sleep himself, but he knows that dream is waiting for him and he doesn’t want to face it, so he sits next to her and listens to her breathe, each inhalation a reminder reality wasn’t as cruel today as Eliot’s subconscious thinks it should have been. 

Aimee’s alive and she’s here and she wants to stay, for a given value of staying. It’s more than Eliot thought he’d have, and as long as she wants to keep working on this, he’s going to be right there fighting for the same thing. 

He’s just going to need to put some more thought into keeping her safe, so his world doesn’t try to spin apart on him.

**Author's Note:**

> So, Aimee kind of gets disorientated in the sense she's hit in the head, but it's more Eliot who loses his bearings at having his two worlds collide. 
> 
> As for why Aimee turns up early, let's blame that on gremlins.


End file.
